1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to integrated supply chain management and more particularly to a distribution management system utilizing user-defined space characteristics and staging analysis.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the global economy provides a proliferation of options for businesses to expand into emerging markets, manufacturing success is increasingly defined by how fast you act and how well you react to supply chain volatility. Modern manufacturing facilities are increasingly becoming more complex as customers expect manufacturers to keep prices low while readily accommodating last-minute changes in quantity, product configuration or delivery date.
Modern manufacturing facilities can produce scores of different types of goods from small shelf stocked items to large configure-to-order (CTO) multi-rack enterprise services. In many cases, these products are individual CTO products that are unique to a particular customer. These products have variable sizes, variable time-to-build cycle times, and may exit manufacturing as individual items or in groups. The manufacturing facilities can have multiple production lines producing many different goods that congregate for shipment at various shipping docks. With numerous shipping docks, numerous potential carriers and/or shippers to service each dock, multiple areas that service certain modes of shipping e.g., air vs. ground, and physical space restrictions, the staging and movement of customer shipments to the shipping lanes has become a daunting task.
These factors can combine to create a complex routing scenario for a product once it leaves the manufacturing realm and enters distribution. Current distribution or warehouse management systems do not properly manage the utilization of the dock/ship lanes and finished goods warehouse staging areas to effectively control the staging of items, the consolidation of shipping entities, the application of various staging strategies and the optimization of available space.
Current distribution or warehouse management systems generally are intended for use with fixed part numbers with fixed locations for storage and retrieval. These distribution or warehouse management systems are not intended for products variable in size, variable in quantity, and pulled by a customer that does not follow the traditional last in first out (LIFO)/first in first out (FIFO) or part bin management principles. Furthermore, traditional distribution or warehouse management systems lack the ability to model different staging strategies based on the specific characteristics about an order, e.g., the “dock” that a shipment is “intended for”. Additionally, these distribution or warehouse management systems lack the ability to create staging strategies that combine the relationship of physical entities to one another, e.g., placing four different sized CTO items in certain area while placing all ship group boxes for this customer in an adjacent location for ease of customer ship entity management.